


we are the lions

by unwhithered



Category: Leverage
Genre: Case Fic, Graphic Description, Gun Violence, Major Character Injury, OT3 if you squint, Other, Violence against women
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-10-02
Updated: 2015-10-06
Packaged: 2018-04-24 11:21:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 10,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4917634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unwhithered/pseuds/unwhithered
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Eliot hears the gunshot twice, a strange echo effect as it tears through the building a moment before his earbud delivers the sound so loudly that he flinches. It sounds like the damn thing went off right next to someone’s head. A heartbeat later his ear fills with someone’s high pitched shriek, a gasp, and what he very much hopes is not the sound of a body hitting the floor."</p><p>This is not a damsel in distress story.  It could be, but it isn't, because Parker is a goddamn bad ass.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. the foxes hunt the hounds

Eliot hears the gunshot twice, a strange echo effect as it tears through the building a moment before his earbud delivers the sound so loudly that he flinches. It sounds like the damn thing went off right next to someone’s head. A heartbeat later his ear fills with someone’s high pitched shriek, a gasp, and what he very much hopes is not the sound of a body hitting the floor.

“What just happened?” Hardison yelps behind him. Eliot hears Hardison’s increasingly panicked shouts of Parker’s name as if from far away, already moving before Nate’s voice joins the cacophony.

“Get out,” Eliot commands. “Leave your crap. Just run.” When Hardison hesitates for a moment too long Eliot shouts at him - over the comms, because he’s already around the corner and running full tilt down another unmarked hallway. “Dammit, Hardison. Go NOW.” He doesn’t bother to reply to Hardison’s demand to know where the hell Eliot thinks he’s going. The answer should be obvious.

The compound they broke into only minutes ago is a maze of unlabeled rooms and bleak gray hallways. The walls echo with girls’ high-pitched voices and the clang of doors - Nate ushering out the women who have been locked in tiny cells for days, waiting for sale into sex slavery. Eliot curses silently the whole way, working only off of memory of the building plans as he runs, busting through doors with his shoulder instead of bothering with doorknobs and locks. Their security is shit - it doesn’t need to be good to imprison half starved teenage girls - and they had thought Parker would be safe lifting the traffickers’ cash and jewels. Hardison and Nate were the slower targets, more in need of protection as Hardison tore apart the office looking for leads to other members of the ring and Nate freed the girls. Eliot should have known better - he, more than anyone else, knows what they do to girls in places like this.

Eliot slides around the last corner, the vault in sight, eyes searching for threats of a body. What he gets is a bullet to the shoulder, for which he smashes both of the gangbanger’s knees before bouncing his head off of the wall hard enough to knock him out with one blow. There isn’t anyone else in the hallway, or in the open vault. Eliot’s heart sinks as he sees that it's been cleared out. The smear of blood he spots on the wall a moment later drops it all the way into his stomach.

“Armored car just pulled away.” Nate, now safe and sound in the back of Lucille, sounds almost detached. He’s drunk again and for a moment Eliot just wants to put his hands around Nate’s throat and -

“She’s in it,” he says instead, forcing out a slow exhale. He can strangle Nate later. Right now he needs to be a professional. A quick check of the rest of the room yields no clues except for a couple of shell casings. Eliot pockets them just in case, then hauls the unconscious guard into a fireman’s carry over his good shoulder with a grunt. “Not enough blood to have killed her. They took her to get to us,” he guesses, starting the long trudge out of the building while Nate is already making plans in his ear. Distantly, he can hear the wail of approaching sirens.  
\----

Parker wakes up in the dark. It takes her eyes long moments to adjust, doubtless not helped along by the wound she can feel throbbing at the base of her skull. When she can see she immediately begins casing the room, looking for exits and potential hiding spots with a thief’s careful eye. There are none. No windows, no nooks, not even any furniture bolted to the floor. Just bare walls and a single door with no knob on her side. It looks exactly like the pictures their client had provided of the target’s holding cells for kidnapped girls. She swallows hard, fighting back memories of the foster family who had locked misbehaving kids in the broom closet like they thought Harry Potter was a guide to childrearing. The panic is stupid, making her lips curl in self disgust - Parker, one of the world’s greatest thieves, is not claustrophobic. Nor is she afraid of thugs that prey on little girls. Not even ones with guns. Not even ones who shot her.

The bullet had gone through the meat of her right thigh, not hitting anything vital as far as she can tell. That must have been on purpose or they would have finished her off while she was out. Still, it hurts like a bitch, and the first time she tries to stand her leg collapses and sends her crashing back to the floor. On her next attempt she leans hard against the wall, keeps her free hand pressed firmly to the messily bandaged wound in her thigh, and manages to gain her feet. Her cell is three steps long and four steps wide - not even big enough to lie down in properly. There are no cracks, nothing she can dig her fingers into, not even a glimmer of light beneath the door, though she can hear someone pacing back and forth outside. By the time she has finished her painstaking exploration of every inch of the room her thigh is bleeding sluggishly and an hour has passed. Parker’s sense of time is impeccable - it has to be in her line of work - but even she can’t guess how long she was out for with no window to tell the time of day, and she knows that with a head wound clouding her mind she may not be able to track the hours as they drag on.

With no other way to mark the hours, she digs her thumb nail into the inside of her wrist to make a jagged line.

-

“Your sent her in there,” Eliot snarls, right up in Nate’s face. This close he can smell the whiskey on Nate’s breath, see how bloodshot his eyes are.

“Our intel was bad,” Nate replies. Calm, too calm. “The last two take downs gave us false confidence. We thought the girls would be more heavily guarded than the vault. We were wrong.”

“Your intel! You thought! You fucked up.” 

“Hardison got enough data to pinpoint their other hideouts, just like we hoped.”

“We’ll get her back, Eliot. We’ll find her.” Sophie, at least, looks shaken beneath her game face. She rests a perfectly manicured hand on Eliot’s arm and smiles softly at him as if he’s a mark, but he backs down a little anyway. Sophie loves Parker, her awkward duckling, in her own strange way.

“Five locations, man.” Bent over the computer and typing furiously, Hardison doesn’t even look up as he speaks. “All over the state. And no way to narrow them down. It’ll take us days to scope out and search them all.”

“I can think of a way to narrow them down for you.” Eliot turns toward the room where their captured guard is tied up. When Nate tries to warn him against hurting the man too badly, Eliot growls. “You had your chance. Now we’re doing things my way - retrieval is my specialty.”

He doesn’t slam the door behind him, but he does throw the lock before he turns to face his captive with a smile that is really just bared teeth. A good guard dog for Nate, a better pit bull for Moreau, when he’s let off the leash with no master Eliot is a wolf. Right now he can smell blood, and his prey is stupid enough to meet his eyes. The poor man’s face pales.

“Good. You’re awake.”

It’s a damn good thing that Hardison soundproofed the office.

\--

Parker has scratched three jagged lines into her arm when the door swings open, giving her a brief glimpse of her captors. After so long in the dark the light is almost blinding. When she stops squinting, she can see that the man in front of her wasn’t among the ones that cornered her in the vault - unsurprising given that Parker is pretty sure she concussed one and dislocated another’s elbow before the wound in her leg slowed her down enough to let them bash her over the head. This guy is big and dark haired, with a nasty looking scar on his cheek. Before her sluggish mind can think of anything to say he drops a bucket and a bottle of water on the floor and retreats. She hears the lock click back into place behind him.

For all she knows the water is drugged, but it doesn’t much matter - she’s lost a fair amount of blood and she’ll be worse off dehydrated than drugged, as long as it doesn’t kill her. She’s sure by now that they don’t want to kill her. You don’t give dead men walking buckets to piss in. The things they did to those girls, though, the hollow eyed teens not all that much younger than her whose cells she unlocked at the first warehouse the crew hit...Parker shudders. She won’t end up like them. Her team is coming for her. Hardison and Eliot are going to destroy these men and she’s going to help.

\--

Eliot walks back into the main room of Nate’s apartment with blood on his hands and a grim set to his jaw. Hardison looks up from his computers only to abruptly snap his gaze away - Eliot thinks the boy looks particularly young today, and like he might just puke. “Is he…?” Hardison swallows hard instead of finishing the question. 

“No, Hardison,” Eliot growls from the kitchen, where he has appropriated a tea towel to mop up his knuckles. Only a small part of the blood is his own. “I didn’t kill him. He just needs some dental work. Now pull me up a map of those other hideouts.”

Nate comes in while Eliot is standing in front of Hardison’s massive screens, pointing out a location in the warehouse district of the next town over and another in an entirely different county. “We narrowed it down to two.” Eliot taps the map without looking at him.

“Good.” Nate has sobered up - or at least looks like he has - and has washed away the stench of whiskey that clung to him for most of the job. He puts a hand on Eliot’s shoulder and looks at him with the piercing, honest gaze that won and keeps Eliot’s respect and loyalty. Sober, Nate is a force to be reckoned with, and one that Eliot needs on his side whether or not he wants to admit it. “We’re going to find her. We’re going to get her back - her and all those other girls. And then we’re going to burn this operation down around these bastard’s ears.”

For the first time in hours Eliot relaxes just a fraction. This is the Nate that he needs to have at his back - the vicious, plotting mastermind who will do whatever it takes to tear down every dishonest criminal who gets in his way. Eliot just wishes that he wasn’t so willing to put the rest of their crew in danger to do it. Though he would never count Parker as vulnerable or defenseless, she’s not a hitter. She needed Eliot and he wasn’t there because Nate had him guarding targets that didn’t need his protection, and it’s going to take a while for him to stop blaming Nate for that.

-

Two hours later Eliot throws the gang member’s body out of the back of Lucille with a note pinned to his chest. The police will find him soon - he’s hogtied a block from their station - and hopefully run down the address on the note, the location of the last house full of trafficked foreign girls that they had to abandon after Parker was taken. The police should at least be competent enough to free twenty mostly unguarded girls in a building that has already been busted into for them.

Nate and Hardison are still plotting when he returns, heads bent over city planning documents and data that Hardison gathered from every location. There isn’t much - whoever runs the trafficking ring is careful to keep their cells insular so that if one gets busted the rest survive. It’s why the crew is taking them down one by one, working their way across the state and trying to pin down whoever is in charge. Nate thinks they came close this time, which is why security was heavier and Parker was snatched from under their nose. It’s likely, Eliot thinks, that they’re tightening security everywhere as a result of the crew’s takedown of other sites. They should have anticipated it, but they got cocky and, in Nate’s case, drunk and stupid.

While Nate and Sophie talk big picture, how to make sure they grab whoever is in charge and keep Sophie’s cover as a client from being blown, Eliot’s focus narrows down. He takes things one job at a time, always has. Right now that job is retrieving Parker - in one piece if possible. He yanks his jacket off of the back of Hardison’s chair, grunts a short explanation to Nate, and goes to begin casing the closest location his interrogation turned up.

\---

Parker is on scratch number seven when the door opens again. Her head is spinning, her stomach growling, and she really needs to pee. That’s what they left the bucket for, but there’s no way she can squat over the damn thing with her leg all torn up, and she’s not about to get rescued by the team stinking of her own piss. She can just picture the way that Hardison would wrinkle up his nose, even though she’s sure Eliot would understand.

This time a man walks all the way into her cell and lets the door swing shut behind him. Not the same one from before - this one is taller, thinner, balding. He wears slacks and a blue dress shirt rolled up to his elbows, his collar open just far enough to show a dark patch of chest hair. Parker takes in all of this, plus the gun at his hip, in the half second before the lock clicks. She recognizes that he isn’t their mark - Anton something, her focus had been on his money and his captives, not on his name and political ties. It she was uninjured Parker thinks she could take him - Eliot is a good combat teacher and she learns fast - but that would still leave her trapped in this tiny room. With no hope of escape, she climbs unsteadily to her feet anyway. It makes her feel a little less trapped to tilt her chin up and look her captor in the eye, her face a cold mask despite the blood dripping down to pool in her boot.

“I would like to talk to your boss,” Not Anton says, each word over-enunciated and made jagged by a thick Eastern European accent. That’s new, she thinks, because all of their contacts up to this point outside of the boss himself have been home grown, all-American criminals. If Sophie or Eliot were here they would be able to pinpoint exactly where her captor is from, by country and probably even province - she can almost hear Eliot huffing “it’s a very distinctive accent” - but her ears aren’t that fine tuned. Parker is far better at jewels and locks than real live human beings, though she’s been learning slowly but surely with Sophie’s help.

“I don’t have a boss,” she replies, just to be contrary.

“I have seen the others with you. Do not lie to me. You try to steal my girls, my territory - you are working for somebody. Not the police. A competitor? Or just an enemy? Either way I would like to speak to him.”

Why do they always assume it’s a guy? Parker wonders, her eyes narrowing. Sweat has begun to roll down her back and fall into her eyes, and her legs quake just from the effort of supporting her own weight. She doesn’t blink, doesn’t look away for even a moment. Parker remembers what it was like to be a young girl in foster homes and on the street, leered at and pushed around by boys and men with the same sleazy air as the man in front of her. She held her ground then and she still does now, even as the world beings to blur at the edges.

“I can’t steal what you don’t own.” She hears her own voice as if from far away. “You can’t own people.”

“I think after a few days here you may change your mind.” Parker knows that smile, has seen its echo too many times throughout her life, and it makes her skin crawl.

“Oh, I’m not going to be here that long.” She lets her lips draw back in a slightly crazed smile, the one that makes Hardison get pinched around the eyes and Eliot grumble “twenty pounds of crazy in a five pound bag.” It’s usually reserved for the moment before she jumps off of a building. Her captor rewards her by going slightly pale before he catches himself, and she guesses that the way he smooths down his tie is a nervous tick and notes it for later.

“We’ll see about that,” he says, turning and rapping on the door. The moment it closes behind him Parker blinks hard against the sweat running into her eyes. She doesn’t sit down so much as collapse back into the corner, allowing herself a moment to shut her eyes and suck in deep breaths between clenched teeth - it doesn’t make a dent in the pain flaring outward from her thigh and the base of her skull, but somehow the gesture makes her feel a little better. Nate would have called it a placebo effect, or something similar, she can’t quite grasp the word...Then she fixes her eyes on the door once more and scratches another line into her arm.

\---

The warehouse is a dead end. 

Well, they rescue a dozen more Syrian girls from their tiny cells and lock a couple of potential buyers up in their place. Nate puts in a call to local PD while Eliot frisks the guards and Hardison makes copies of all of their records. Usually they would take that as a win. This time it’s a dead end, getting them no closer to Parker - getting them further away, in fact, as the new intelligence yields new possible locations and Eliot’s next _discussion_ with a captive proves less fruitful than the last. This time he has to drop the guy in front of an emergency room instead of the police station.

\---

Parker reaches twenty scratches before the door opens again and a bottle of water slides through the gap. She has puked twice into her little bucket by then - not a good sign with a head injury, she knows - and she’s been running scenarios on how to pee in the damn thing without falling in for a while and coming up empty. Crawling the short distance to the door with her right leg dragging uselessly behind her isn’t the least dignified thing Parker has ever done, but it’s close. Being so helpless and trapped is definitely contributing to her nausea.

At some point between small, careful sips of water she drifts into a restless and painful sleep.


	2. hell bent and bound

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I lied, this time the chapter title is from a Christian Kane song - _Making Circles_ \- off of Welcome to My House, which has been my soundtrack for typing up and editing this chapter.
> 
> By the way, you can find me over on Tumblr as [unwhithered](http://unwhithered.tumblr.com/), where I mostly just ramble about Leverage and life and reblog OT3 gifs.

Eliot knows that the first twenty four hours after a kidnapping are the most important - this isn’t the first time he’s retrieved a stolen girl, just the first time he won’t be getting paid at the end. With each successive day the chances of finding her alive plummet, and they’ve just ticked over into day two.

When Nate picks up a bottle just after three am Eliot vaults the kitchen counter and decks him. Only Sophie sliding between them, hands outstretched and gaze pleading, saves Nate from another blow. None of them miss the fact that Hardison is half a step behind Eliot, ready to back him up. He reaches blindly behind himself to rest a hand on Hardison’s chest, not sure whether he’s trying to stabilize Hardison or himself, and grinds his teeth as Nate pulls himself up with a white-knuckle grip on the counter.

“You touch that bottle again and Sophie’s not gonna be enough to stop me.” From the look in Sophie’s eye, it doesn’t look like she would even try. Before Nate even leaves the kitchen she starts pouring every whiskey bottle she can find down the drain, rifling through every cupboard to find the ones he’s hidden.

The next guard Eliot drags into the back room of their office is probably never going to walk again. This time Hardison is too exhausted to even look horrified when Eliot stomps out with blood on his shirt and an ugly grimace. He, like all of them, has been buried in work since Parker disappeared, only looking up from his data when they go out to bust another warehouse full of trafficked girls or Sophie shoves a takeout container under his nose. He’s starting to reek, but then again so is Eliot. At least Hardison doesn’t have another man’s blood caked under his fingernails.

They have finally exhausted all of their options within adjacent counties. Eliot washes the blood from his hands in the bathroom sink, bumping shoulders with Sophie as she carefully dries and curls her hair. He zips her dress up with fingers that just fractured a man’s spine, then holds her hand as she steps daintily into a black SUV with Nate behind the wheel acting as her chauffeur. There’s a sad, faraway look in Sophie’s eyes when she kisses his cheek and wishes him luck. The pit in his stomach gets heavier. He doesn’t like sending the two of them into such dangerous company without backup, but a moment later Eliot is sliding behind the wheel of Lucille as Hardison climbs into the back. They have another location to case, and it’s a long drive on a good day. Today is not a good day.

Who knew Lucille could his 100 on the highway?

\---

Parker wakes up stiff, cold and confused. Blinking the haze from her eyes, she looks up to find that she’s not alone. Worse, she has no idea how long she was unconscious, though she counts the scratches on her arm with her fingertips anyway and guesses that hour twenty four slid past while she was out.

“What do you want now?” She bites out, blunt and just barely managing to throttle down pain.

“I want you to tell me where your friends are.” He leans over her, his leer from earlier replaced by an ugly glare. Parker can see the stress and fear around his eyes and can’t help her smirk. That can only mean that her crew is doing their job well. Pride pools warmth in her belly that almost takes the edge off of the cold pain seeping through her limbs.

“How would I know?” Eyes narrowed and smirk shaky but in place, she tilts her head. This time she doesn’t even try to get up - falling over would be worse than sitting for this conversation. “You’ve had me in here this whole time.”

An undignified grunt escapes Parker when his boot comes down on her wounded thigh. She wasn’t expecting that. Blood loss and head trauma are to blame, but she’s supposed to be better, sharper than this. She’s Parker. Choking down the whine welling up in her throat, she forces a smirk back onto her pale face. He takes that as an invitation to grind his heel in harder.

“Give me a general idea.”

“Not a clue.” Sweat is all but pouring off of her and she can feel fresh blood trickling down her thigh. Teeth gritted, she still meets his gaze.

“Your friends are tearing my business apart now, sweetheart, so if you don’t come up with an _educated guess_ soon my boys will be paying you a visit. They like to take the merchandise out for a spin before we sell it.” When he leans over with his creepy smile and digs his heel into the meat of her thigh, she spits in his face. It earns her a backhand, but once the stars clear from her eyes she grins up at him with bloody teeth. “Though I doubt we could get much for you anyway.”

When the door closes behind him and she is alone in the dark again, Parker screams. Long and loud and angry at the world, she bellows all of her fury and pain at the cold gray walls and the handleless door and her own helplessness, her own stupidity for getting caught. With that out of her system, she grits her teeth through lifting her hips enough to peel her pants down to her knees. The wound in her thigh isn’t clean - the bullet didn’t go all the way through, is still stuck in there somewhere, and crusted old blood is now being joined by a fresh flood of red. It’s too much blood, and her nausea returns with a vengeance. This is very, very bad.

Next she shrugs out of her thin shirt, ripping it into shreds with shaking hands and starting to bind up her leg. She should have done it earlier but, stupidly, she expected Eliot to come busting through the door before now with Nate and Hardison on his heels. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Back when there had been no one to rescue her she might have been sharper. Might have figured a way out of here by now. (Back when there had been no one to rescue her they probably would have killed her already, but she blocks those grim thoughts out.) After tying the last knot she lets her eyes slip shut and curls up on herself the best she can. Before letting herself drift again, she carves another line into her arm with a ragged thumbnail.

\---

There was barely any security at the first hideout that they hit, which made them lazy with the second and lazier with the third - which was how Parker got grabbed. With every successive takedown the security has gotten tighter, the guards more numerous and the girls more terrified, money and records moved off premises before they arrive. Eliot knows that the only reason the crew is still coming out on top is that the trafficking ring is so spread out and isolated from each individual branch, but he’s worried it won’t stay that way for long. They’re all running on fumes and Sophie thinks the mark is starting to suspect her given the string of attacks that have taken place on his businesses since she started looking to buy. If they don’t find Parker soon Eliot is afraid they never will - but he doesn’t tell Hardison that as they case the next place.

Hardison is all bloodshot eyes and shaky hands when Eliot jumps back into Lucille. “She’s in there,” Hardison says in a voice stronger than Eliot expected. He’s just a kid, Eliot thinks again, a kid who pulled cyber crimes and made rich men squirm from behind a computer screen, not with a knife at their throat. As Hardison has said before, he didn’t sign up for a job where people really get hurt. All things considered he’s been handling it well for years. This one just hits too close to home - for all of them. Reminds them that they’re never entirely safe from all of the enemies they’ve made, and it can all be over in a moment if they slip up or slow down. Eliot has always known how he’ll go out - the day he goes up against someone younger and stronger and faster and is just a little too slow to dodge, or gets backed into a corner with too many guns between him and the exit. None of the rest of them had to think that way before. The worst thing they were facing down was a whole lot of jail time, and Eliot wishes he could protect them from all the new dangers this life has brought them. After all, protecting them is his job, but that one is too big even for him.

“She’s in there,” Hardison repeats, swallowing hard. “That bug you planted - I heard - they were talking about...we’ve gotta get her outta there, man. We’ve gotta.”

If Eliot still worked alone he would go now, and damn the consequences. But he doesn’t. He works for a man named Nate Ford, who is smarter than he’ll ever be and more cold and calculated than he hopes Hardison ever becomes - when he’s sober. “We will,” he promises, putting a hand on Hardison’s shoulder and meeting his eyes to give the promise more weight. “Just as soon as Nate and Sophie get here.” 

Hardison nods, slowly, like it hurts him. Eliot knows the feeling.

\---

Cold has settled into Parker’s bones. She stopped shivering a while ago, which is always a bad sign, and it scares the hell out of her that her nimble fingers have gone numb and clumsy. A memory surfaces, slow like the molasses Eliot pours into cake mix at Christmas time, and she smiles softly when she recognizes his voice in the back of her mind. In that icy cave, looking at the body they couldn’t drag to the surface with them, Eliot had said that it was good that it was the two of them down there. They could do things the others couldn’t - put it away in that place inside of them that they don’t show to anyone else, she thinks, the place where she keeps her explosions and Eliot traps the memories of what he did for Damien Moreau. It’s good that she’s the one locked in this cell, she realizes slowly, because Hardison and Sophie would have broken by now - probably Nate too, trapped in this claustrophobic little room with nothing to drink and no one to talk to - and they would have done far worse than kick Eliot and let him go hungry. It’s good that she’s the one here. She can take it. She can die with their secrets, if she has to.

She just doesn’t want to.

\---

Nate has a plan. As usual, Plan A doesn’t go quite right, but Plan B gets Eliot through the door and into the guard room full of second-rate thugs without anyone getting shot, though that one guy probably isn’t ever getting up from having his head bounced off the doorframe. Once Nate and Hardison have followed him in he throws them a pair of keys from a hook by the door and goes to clear their path into the rest of the building. If some necks get broken along the way, well, no one who sells fifteen year olds into sex slavery deserves to live, and in this case he doesn’t think the rest of the crew is going to argue the point.

The stitches in Eliot’s shoulder have definitely ripped - for the third time in two days, Sophie’s hands getting shakier every time she has to pull the ragged edges of his skin back together - by the time he turns a corner and spots the mark that Sophie has been schmoozing for a week. The plan definitely does not include him taking another bullet before collaring Anton Denisov and throwing him into a wall, but he does it anyway. Distantly, he can hear doors opening and Nate shouting commands and girls crying. He thinks Hardison is yelling something panicked at him, and only hopes the kids isn’t stupid enough to get in his way.

“Where is she?” he snarls, keeping Denisov pinned with his good arm.

“I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

“Wrong answer.” Eliot hears ribs crack under his elbow. “Tell me where she is and the cops will drag you out of here with all yer limbs still attached.”

“Dead,” he replies, lips drawing back in something like a smile beneath cold eyes. “I’m afraid some of the boys got a little too...excited.” For just a second, Eliot panics. Hardison lets out a choking sob behind him, and it’s enough distraction for Denisov to get in a good punch to Eliot’s injured shoulder. He stumbles pack with a curse and Denisov leaps past him. There’s a scuffling sound followed by a thump, and when Eliot turns around Hardison is standing with one foot on Denisov’s broken ribs and a gun in his hand. It isn’t even shaking. Later, Eliot will congratulate him on that, but for now he settles for stomping hard on the hand reaching for Hardison’s ankle. When something crunches audibly he flashes a sick smile.

“You’ve got this tell,” Eliot growls. “You look down when you lie. Now like I said, you can walk outta here with all your parts of we can do this the hard way.”

“At the end of the hall.” Denisov’s face has gone white with fear and pain and Eliot can feel that primal part of himself that he’s tried to bury enjoying every second of it. “There’s a room. Around the corner. Just don’t…” That sentence would probably have ended in “hurt me” if Eliot hadn’t kicked him in the head before he could finish. He’ll probably wake up. May even get out of a hospital bed someday.

The guy standing in front of the door at the end of the hallway trying to jam a pair of keys into its lock isn’t so lucky. Eliot is pretty sure he was hoping to use Parker as a hostage, and he’s had enough of that for a lifetime over the past few days.

\---

Parker can hear movement outside where there was only silence before. Not just the steady shuffle of someone pacing, either, loud thuds and shouts that would have had her up and bracing herself for whatever was coming yesterday - hopefully her crew, but maybe trouble. Today she lifts her head slowly to blink at the door and licks at her dry lips. They haven’t slid any water through since her captor’s last visit around hour number forty. By her count she’s reached fifty hours in this dark little box, though she’s passed out a couple of times and her memory is getting shoddy with exhaustion, so it’s probably been more. At least the men he promised a visit from haven’t appeared - she thinks that maybe that means Nate and the rest have been doing a good job giving them hell.

As the door creaks she pushes herself into an upright sitting position, brushes her hair out of her face, then crosses her arms over her bare upper body. Parker isn’t usually one to care about nudity, but she doesn’t like looking any more vulnerable and exposed than she already is around these leering men. Not for the first time, she wishes she had worn a bra on this job. Her jaw clenches as the first bar of light leaks into her dark cell and though she hates having to look away, it’s better than being blinded.

“Parker,” she hears, low and gruff, and her stomach drops. It’s all in her head again, she’s been hearing Eliot in the back of her mind for hours, going even crazier than they already say she is. And yet the voice is followed up by hands on her shoulders, on her face, and she hisses in pain when they find the lump on the back of her head. “Parker, Eliot says again, and when she squints through the harsh light she sees long hair and blue eyes and sharply furrowed brows. They’re his angry eyebrows, and she wonders why she’s mad. She wonders if she’s dead and that’s why. Eliot would be pretty pissed if she went and died on him.

\---

The first thing Eliot notices is the smell - it hits him as soon as he cracks the door, which he opens slowly in case she’s behind it. The second thing he notices is the complete and total darkness, not even a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling to provide light if they wanted it. Keeping someone locked in a cold, dark cell with only a bucket to piss in is torture, plain and simple, and he doubts that’s where the torment ended.

“Hardison, go help Nate with those girls.” Eliot blocks the door with his body and hopes Hardison doesn't breathe too deep.

“No, man.” Eliot can hear the set of Hardison’s jaw, the stubborn glare on his familiar face, and it makes him growl.

“The way you help Parker right now is by helping Nate. I’ll get her out.” He turns over his shoulder and lets his eyes soften just a little. “I’ll get her out, Hardison.” It works. There’s so much trust in the kid’s eyes that Eliot’s chest aches with it - or maybe that’s just the bruises starting to catch up with him. Hardison swallows hard, nods, and bounds back down the hallway toward the sound of Nate’s voice. Eliot braces himself and pushes the door the rest of the way open.

There she is. Jesus, finally, there she is. Half naked and filthy and caked with blood but alive, her chest rising and falling with shallow breaths. God only knows what they’ve done to her - one look can tell him it’s pretty bad - but they’ll deal with that later. Between the five of them they can deal with just about anything as long as they’re together. What matters now is that they’ve found her.

“Parker,” he says, forcing himself to move after too long spent drinking in the sight of her. He can look his fill later. For now he crouches in front of her and reaches out, touching her shoulder first to warn her before beginning to carefully check her for injuries other than the obvious ones. “Parker, look at me. Do you know who I am?”

When she looks up her eyes are glassy and far away. She seems to be struggling to focus on his face, and she opens her mouth a couple of times before words come out, rough and scratchy. “Of course I do, silly.” Calloused fingers wrap around his wrist, grip weaker than he’s ever felt it, and she winces when he probes a bump at the base of her skull. Old blood is tacky on his fingers when he moves on. “Eliot. I knew you’d find me.”

“I did, sweetheart, I did.” Eliot tries not to think of how close they came to not finding her in time. He recognizes her sunken eye sockets and blue tinged skin for what is it - as women a day from death, dehydrated and drained of too much blood and so cold she isn’t even shivering anymore. A lesser woman would have slipped away by now, but Parker is nothing if not fierce and strong and stubborn. “You hurt anywhere else?”

Parker blinks sluggishly and looks like she wants to speak. Instead she slowly lifts her hand to touch her blackened eye, then drops it to the mess of her thigh, so crusted up with old blood that he can’t tell what’s going on even after he peels back the shreds of what must be her shirt. “Alright,” he says, mostly to himself, but Parker’s head tips toward the sound of his voice so he keeps going, murmuring nonsense words to her as he checks her over. Blood isn’t the only thing crusted between her thighs, and this is why he sent Hardison away - dude doesn’t need to see what spending three days locked in a cell and unable to move really looks like.

Eliot shrugs out of his bloody flannel and the t-shirt beneath, ripping the tee in half - one to do a rough job of wiping her down and the other to tie her leg back up. His flannel goes around her bare shoulders in a sad attempting at keeping her warm that at least covers most of her nakedness. Then he slides one arm under her knees and the other behind back and heaves them both up, stumbling to find his footing. The ripped stitches in his shoulder are a dull ache - it’s the fresh wound where Denisov’s bullet grazed his ribs that really screams as he walks out into the hall, only to trip on the body laid out in front of the door and fall to his knees. Parker groans and he curses a blue streak.

“Looks like you’re gonna have to walk a little, sweetheart,” he says regretfully, not asking if she can. She has to, and so she will.

Slow though she is to respond, Parker manages to get her feet under herself, though her gaze remains trained on the body on the floor. Recognition is flickering in her eyes when Eliot finally manages to catch them. “Did you kill him?” He nods, and if he doesn’t like the crazed, bloody-toothed smile she gives him in response, he does understand it. “Good.”

With his good shoulder braced against her bad side and both of them leaning heavily on each other they manage to limp around the corner like some kind of three legged monstrosity. Nate and Hardison have tied up all the men that Eliot took down on the way in, and shepherded a dozen crying girls who don’t appear to speak English into what looks like an office. Hardison is on the phone with the police, doing one of his stupid voices, but he drops the phone when Eliot and Parker sway dangerously on their way through the door.

Hardison tries to help, and Nate just plain old tries to pull Parker from his arms, only prompting Eliot to tighten his grip and snarl at them. Pure animal instinct is telling him not to let her out of his reach again. She isn’t safe yet. “She’s alive. We can walk. Now _move_ before the cops bust us too.”

They must see something in his gaze, because Hardison rears back like he’s been burned and Nate just nods - Nate never just nods. By the time they reach the street Eliot’s knees are starting to buckle under Parker’s weight - slight even before three days of being starved - and every step jolts another whimper out of her. The chill outside makes him flinch and wakes Parker up enough to take some more of her own weight, though she almost trips him up trying to press her face against the heat of his skin. His bare, bloody chest heaves with the effort of dragging them both across the last few yards, their breath clouding the air as Sophie pulls Lucille around. Inside the van is gloriously warm, and when Hardison bundles in behind them and Nate slams the door before sliding into the passenger seat, something eases in Eliot’s chest. They are far from out of the woods yet, but as Sophie steps on the gas just as sirens sound in the distance, Eliot thinks they might just all make it out the other side alive.


	3. something's gotta give

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This may be the gratuitous whump that I have apparently so far managed to avoid. Oh well.
> 
> Still listening to _Welcome to My House!_. _Something's Gotta Give_ in particular has been my soundtrack while typing this up at work today. Because I am an irresponsible human who writes fanfic at work.

Eliot is the one shirtless and dripping blood on the floor of the van, Parker laying beside him half-conscious and almost completely naked with blood beginning to seep through her makeshift bandages, but Hardison is the one hyperventilating. He doesn’t seem to know what to do with his hands, reaching out to them only to pull back when Eliot snarls wordlessly. Finally, he makes himself useful and digs up a couple of water bottles to slide across the floor to Eliot, who cracks one and props Parker up enough to pour some through her parched lips. Her eyelids flutter, and then she grabs for the bottle and drinks like a dying thing - which she almost was.

“Slow,” Eliot warns, pulling the bottle away despite her whimpered protests. “Slow or you’ll just puke it all back up.” Water is only a stop gap - she needs an IV, maybe even a blood transfusion, but if they take her to a hospital they will probably all get arrested. Sophie is driving to their closest safehouse like the devil himself is chasing them. There they can at least get her the IV, patch her up as well as possible, though Eliot is best at that and he’s hardly in a state to do it. For Parker, he’ll manage.

He feeds her water in small, careful sips and lets her lean hard against his good shoulder. One of his hands is keeping firm pressure on her bandaged thigh in an attempt to keep as much of her blood inside her body as possible. He loses track of time like that for a while, the van silent except for everyone’s frantic breathing and Sophie’s occasional curse at traffic. They’re all alive. Not whole, not even really safe, but alive. He did that much for them.

\---

This particular safe house is an out of the way little place with soundproof walls and six different kinds of security. Parker, Hardison and Eliot had tested it over and over again until they were satisfied that not even they could break in, and then stocked it with supplies that would impress a doomsday prepper. After all, every good criminal has at least one house for when everything goes to hell - between the five of them they have a lot of enemies and almost as many places to go to ground when it’s necessary. Right now it is, because there is no good way to get them up to Nate’s apartment above the bar bleeding and broken. Too many eyes, too many people that recognize them, and they aren’t ready to burn those aliases yet.

Hardison carries Parker inside because Eliot can’t, hobbling behind them with Nate bracing his good side as Sophie rushes ahead to open the door. The kitchen counter becomes a hospital bed, something Hardison might jokingly complain about later if Parker makes it out of this alright, and Hardison slides a pillow under Parker’s head as Eliot walks Sophie through how to place an IV while he cleans and wraps his own ribs and, with Nate’s help, his shoulder. Needles make Hardison squeamish and Nate has an alcoholic’s shaky hands, so Sophie is Eliot’s helper by default. He’s picked up a lot of skills over the years, but he’s not a doctor by any means - Parker probably needs all sorts of help that he can’t give her.

What he can do is help Sophie wash the blood and filth from her legs until they can see the actual wound. It’s a big, angry, infected patch of skin around a bullet hole with no exit wound. The smell is enough to make Eliot wince and Sophie turn away gagging. Every time he touches the surrounding area with carefully probing fingers Parker groans and tries to shift away. He hasn’t given her any painkillers, knowing that she feels the same way about them that he does - they would rather white knuckle it through the pain than be drugged and unaware of their surroundings, though she’s so feverish and drifting in and out of consciousness that it hardly matters. Still, it’s the principal of the thing. Even calling Nate over to help pin her down makes Eliot’s gut twist with guilt.

With Nate holding Parker down at the chest and hips, Eliot snaps on gloves and rips a clean scalpel out of its package. What follows isn’t pretty - even Sophie’s acting fails her, and she gags loudly as she holds the wound open with forceps. Hardison has to leave the room when Parker starts screaming and a moment later there’s a loud thump from the hallway, followed by what sounds like a sob. Eliot blocks it out. Days of starvation and motionlessness have left Parker weak, thank god, or she just might have thrown Nate off before Eliot could get the bullet out. It clatters to the floor with a collective sigh of relief, though cleaning the hole it left behind isn’t much better. Eliot closes it up with butterfly bandages rather than stitches, sure that they’ll need to clean it out again soon, and collapses backward onto a bar stool as Sophie wraps Parker’s leg in clean white gauze.

Distantly, he thinks that he should clean himself up - his jeans are ruined and his bandages are already staining red - but instead he leans his head on his bloody hands and watches Parker’s chest rise and fall unevenly. Pale faced and pinched around the mouth, Sophie leans next to him. Out of the corner of his eye, he watches her stare down at her bloody hands where they hold on to Parker’s. Their shoulders brush with every inhale, and Eliot hopes Sophie draws as much comfort from the simple human contact as he does. The reassurance that this is real, all of them alive and breathing in the same space again, thrums through him every time their skin touches.

Eventually Sophie disappears to wash up, and on her way back coaxes Hardison in to lift Parker off of the bloodstained counter and take her to one of the bedrooms. He tries to prop her up with fluffy pillows and cover her in thick blankets that she throws off before Sophie even finishes changing her IV bag, let alone injecting the line with the strongest antibiotics in Eliot’s stash. It isn’t conscious - Parker isn’t doing anything consciously at this point, just tossing and turning and mumbling in her sleep. By the time Eliot has choked back his own antibiotics, slipped into fresh clothing and pulled up a chair beside her bed she has already sweated through the thin t-shirt they covered her in and thrown every pillow off of the bed.

Hardison has taken one and propped himself up up in a chair at the foot of the bed. Eliot wants desperately to just shuck his pants and crawl right into the damn thing with her, but even if they didn’t carefully avoid public displays of affection in front of the rest of their little family he knows that Parker hates to be touched without her permission. After everything that has happened to her over the past three days, Eliot isn’t about to push his luck and touch her without her consent. He kicks his bare feet up on the edge of the bed instead, boots and a knife within easy reach, and tells himself it’s enough that Hardison soon mimics him and every so often his toes drag along the inside of Eliot’s ankle. Letting his head tip back, he cradles his bad arm across his chest. They probably have a sling somewhere that he’ll dig up later. He hurts too bad to sleep even if he wanted to, but at some point Hardison nods off and Eliot drifts in a haze with the quiet sound of Nate and Sophie’s voices in the next room punctuated by Hardison’s occasional whistling snores.

\---

Next time Eliot blinks his eyes open Parker is awake. He can tell before he even looks at her face - her body has gone completely still, her breathing slow and measured like when she’s crawling through an air duct. Pain is clear in every tense line of her body, but when he finally looks at her face he finds it schooled to careful blankness, just the slightest hint of frown lines at the corners of her mouth. That’s his girl.

“Hurt too much to sleep?” He keeps his voice quiet. Hardison needs the sleep, even if neither of them can join him.

She nods almost imperceptibly and licks at her lips. Taking the hint, Eliot reaches for the bottle of water that Sophie left on the bedside table. As she drinks he levers himself out of the chair and replaces her IV, gives her another dose of antibiotics. “Don’t pull it out,” he growls, grabbing Parker’s hand when she starts picking at the tape holding the needle in her bony hand. Normally she would easily evade him - this time she stares dumbly down at where one of his big hands has trapped both of her own. She flexes her fingers experimentally, then turns them over when he loosens his grip. Fragility is not something that he associates with Parker - strength, grace, bullheaded stubbornness, but not fragility or neediness - but it’s the first thing that comes to mind when her ice cold fingers wrap around his own and tug. The feel of her skin beneath his fingertips reassures him that this is real, they found her alive and got her out. 

Eliot can never touch things in his dreams no matter how hard he tries. 

\---

Everything is blurry and numb as Parker drifts between sleep and waking. She wonders if she’s dead, except Eliot is there and that means she’s safe. She wonders if they’ve drugged her, but the lancing pain every time she moves says otherwise. Eventually she stops wondering, because thinking takes a surprising amount of energy. Eliot’s hand is warm and strong under her cold fingers and that’s all that matters. He found her just like she knew he would - she’s just glad he found her alive.

“You found me,” she repeats aloud sometime later. Her voice is scratchy, pained. She gets the feeling she was screaming at some point - has vague memories of being held down and hurt that make her shudder. Eliot’s hand squeezes her own, and then a moment later the bed dips and he strokes down her back. When she curls in her face presses against something warm and soft and his voice is a rumble against her cheek as much as a sound. 

“I found you. Nothin’ in the world coulda stopped me from finding you. I got you, sweetheart. Rest. I got you.”

“I know,” she whispers, nuzzling her cheek against his thigh like nothing more than an overgrown cat. “It’s good that it was me.” Sleep tugs her under slowly, then all at once.

\---

Eliot stares down at Parker for a long time, wondering what she meant by that. Three sleepless days are a pretty good excuse for taking a few hours to remember a conversation they had so long ago, but when he does he winces. Imagining Parker in that dark cell telling herself that it was a good thing she was the one trapped because she could do things the rest of the team couldn’t makes him want to puke. He wonders what they did to her, what she suffered for their ragged little family. Memories of what those scumbags had done to the other girls they kidnapped and sold flash behind his eyes every time he closes them, followed by plans of what he’s going to do to every single one of them. Eliot will break into every damn prison in the country just to kill them for touching little girls that way, for touching his girl that way. He’s killed men for it before. This time, he gets the feeling that Hardison and Parker will help.

Eliot Spencer is a lot of things, but he is not a rapist, and he has no tolerance for men that are.

\---

Parker wakes up burning hot and sure this is some new torment from her captor. Falling asleep was stupid - she’s lost track of time again and, almost worse, she dreamed of Sophie’s soft hands brushing her hair back, Hardison’s voice in her ear, Eliot’s warm skin against her cheek. Opening her eyes to the four dark walls of her cell again is going to _suck_. Keeping them closed, she runs the fingers of her right hand down her left arm, counting the scratches - some shallow, some deep and ugly, more than a few warm with infection. Halfway through she loses count and has to start over.

She loses count again around forty.

Again at fifty.

With a shout of frustration she lashes out at the nearest wall. Where there should be concrete her fist strikes something soft - flesh? - and half a second later someone groans in pain. Parker bolts upright, half afraid her captor has finally sent those men in to ‘visit’ her, only to be greeted by Eliot with a halo of matted bedhead and a week’s worth of scruff mirroring her actions. It looks like he was slumped over on the edge of the bed, their joined hands the only point of contact until she punched him.

“Good morning, sleeping beauties.”

That voice - it’s too good to be true, and Parker turns her head slowly. Hardison is sitting cross legged at the end of the bed with a tablet in his lap and bags under his eyes. He grins at her big and easy, like she hasn’t sweated through her clothing, like this room doesn’t stink of filth and blood, like nothing matters because he’s so happy that she’s there in front of him. He is.

“How long were we out?” Eliot’s voice is gruff. Parker sees his hand coming, every move deliberately telegraphed so that she can pull away. When she doesn’t he cups the back of her neck, then rubs soothingly down the length of her spine. She leans into it, realizing too late that she’s starting to tip over sideways. Sitting in the same position for days has left every part of her aching and weak.

“Twelve solid hours.” Sophie this time, leaning in the doorway with a mug in one hand and two syringes in the other. “I was starting to worry, but Nate said to let you sleep. I suppose you needed it.”

Her words don’t matter. Parker’s gaze is trained on the needles in her hand, capped but with clear liquid filling each syringe. “No drugs.” Tensing up and starting to stand, Parker’s vision whites out as her bad leg collapses. Eliot and Hardison both jump to catch her. Even as she falls she’s setting her jaw and arguing, struggling against the two sets of hands holding her. “Eliot, tell her no drugs. I can’t be slow. Being slow gets you caught. I can’t get caught again.”

As her voice gets increasingly shrill and panicked she feels Eliot’s arms slide around her, Hardison’s hands cradling hers not to restrain, just to touch, like she’s something precious. She doesn’t have the strength to fight them both off. “They’re just antibiotics, sweetheart,” Eliot is murmuring in her ear, low like it’s a conversation only for them. It helps her block out the panic, the sight of Sophie still looming there with drugs in her hand, bringing her into a space where it’s just her and Eliot and his quiet morning voice, the one he uses after one of them has had a nightmare about those things they don’t talk about. Maybe the last few days were a nightmare and she’s just now waking up.

“Just antibiotics. One of those is for me. We’re both pretty banged up, and we’re not gonna get better without ‘em. You know I wouldn’t let them give us anything to slow us down, anything that’d keep me from protecting you guys. C’mon, I’ll take mine first.”

Parker watches closely as Eliot takes one of the syringes from Sophie and slides the needles into his bare arm, injecting it smoothly. It’s the first time she realizes he’s shirtless, and that there are stark white bandages binding up his chest and shoulder. She reaches out to touch the edge of one and feels more than sees the way he tenses, still hyper aware and in control of his body. They weren’t narcotics. “Okay,” she says sharply. Her hand spreads out to press against Eliot’s chest - warm and solid and absolutely real - and she watches as Sophie injects the contents of the syringe into her IV line.

When she drifts off again it’s not drugs, just days of pain and exhaustion pulling her under. Eliot is there beside her, and Hardison is typing away quietly with one hand while his other rests on her bare ankle, and this is real.

This is real.

\---

Eliot slumps beside Parker, his arm going numb beneath her and his shoulder and side both protesting the awkward position. It doesn’t matter. If he can take two bullets for her, he can certainly serve as a glorified human pillow while she tosses and turns in a restless, fevered sleep, even though he needs to change his own bandages and even more desperately needs to take a piss. 

Sophie has taken up his chair beside the bed, legs crossed primly at the ankles and hands folded in her lap. If not for her bare feet and bare face it might as well be any other day at the office. No, he thinks, not really - like this he can see the lines of age around her eyes and mouth, the uneven coloring of her skin, and the damp patches on her shirt where her wet hair has dripped. If she’s acting now she’s even better than he thought, and Eliot has thought highly of her talents for a long time. If not, it’s the most honest he has ever seen her. She looks old and tired, the kind of tired that settled into Eliot’s bones years ago, and he wishes he could be a shield for them against the ravages of time. He wishes...well, he wishes a lot of things these days, and he’s never been a wishing man before.

Eventually Sophie breaks the silence that has settled over the room. “Nate’s drinking.” She looks down at her hands, twists them in her lap. The paint on her thumbnails is chipped like she’s been chewing them. “He blames himself, you know. For all of it. He hasn’t slept. I...Eliot, if you won’t forgive him, at least help him plan.”

“I’ve already _been_ planning,” Hardison interrupts. Eliot thought he had gone to sleep, slouched in a chair at the end of the bed with his head pillowed beside Parker’s hip, only grunting occasionally when she kicks him. “We’re going to burn those bastards to the ground.”

“Not without me.” Thin and scratchy, Parker’s voice cuts through the room and the rest of them fall silent. “Not without me you don’t.”

That, Eliot thinks, is _his_ girl. His boy. Ready to stand up to this together no matter how many horrors have been visited upon them in the past week. He catches Sophie’s eyes and nods. 

That’s when he knows they’ll really be alright.

**Author's Note:**

> I am going to go back to the fluffy, porny story, but this hit me last week and I've been writing it out by hand in my free moments at work. I think it's 75% done, it's just a matter of typing and editing the rest of it. 
> 
> Also, because it amuses me, the titles of all over my Leverage works will probably continue to be Fall Out Boy lyrics.


End file.
